


Cold Outside

by tsait



Category: Dragon Age
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-01
Updated: 2012-08-01
Packaged: 2017-11-11 03:57:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/474256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsait/pseuds/tsait
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fenris plays host to a street kid. Sort of. It doesn't end well.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cold Outside

One night when Fenris comes home, there is a child sleeping curled up on his doorstep. He probably recognised the mansion, falling down and decrepit, as the only place in Hightown where he could be anywhere near without being shooed away. Fenris steps around him and goes inside.

He doesn’t see him for a week, and he figures it is the last he has seen of him. Dead or gone to Darktown. Fenris doesn’t care.

The next time he sees him, it is in the middle of the day. Brave, considering he looks like nothing more than a street-rat ready to pick the bulging pockets of the men and women of Hightown. He sits next to Fenris’ door, looks up when he comes closer. His hair is filthy, dirt is packed under his nails, and his clothes are in tatters. He can see the last of a bruise fading under his eye, and around his neck. He couldn’t be more than twelve. He doesn’t say anything. Fenris pauses, then walks inside.

Much later, when he’s certain that the boy is asleep, he leaves out some of the untouched bread rolls that Hawke had brought him. They’re gone the next morning, and so is the boy.

He turns up more regularly after that. It works for both of them. The boy won’t starve, and Hawke no longer complains about Fenris letting the food she brought him go stale. Fenris tells himself it is the latter that keeps him feeding him. He counts himself lucky he lives in Hightown – if he started giving out food to skinny children anywhere else in Kirkwall, there’d be a line at his door every night.

This continues for months. Sometimes the boy doesn’t came back for weeks at a time, then he reappears. They never speak to each other. That suits Fenris.

Winter comes, cold and bitter. Fenris fumbles with the matches, his fingers too cold to hold them properly, curses under his breath. As soon as he gets the fire lit, he hears a soft tap on the door. He likes his routine – Hawke visits every second evening, at a predictable time. If any others visit, they call his name before knocking, know that he prefers that. It is a good sign that whoever it is is knocking at all, though - he supposes anyone sent from Danarius wouldn’t bother. But he still opens the door with a hand on his sword, ready to fight –

A boy half his height, with wet hair stuck across his forehead and ribs showing under his soaking clothes each time he inhales. He recoils a little when he sees Fenris, and has to fight to take his eyes off the sword.

“Um,” he starts.

Fenris closes the door in his face.

The boy still turns up most evenings, and Fenris still leaves him food. But he doesn’t knock again. He sometimes looks up hopefully at Fenris when he comes home, on evenings when it is cold and raining, but it never gets him anywhere.

Until it starts snowing. The boy still isn’t wearing anything other than the rags he had been wearing in the summer. Fenris leaves out a blanket one night, and he sees the boy use it once, then never again. Sold, or stolen. He doesn’t give him another.

One day there is a snowstorm so bad that Fenris doesn’t leave the mansion. He stays in front of the fire, tries to write out the letters Hawke had taught him with cramped, cold fingers. When he can stand that no longer he paces, engages in a swordfight with an old chair, feeds the fire with anything he can find in the mansion. Each winter the house grows more and more empty for that reason alone. Walking past the front room of his house to pick up a pile of broken wood, he hears a sniffle and a violent cough.

He owes the child nothing. It is dangerous to welcome a stranger inside. He will expect to be let in whenever he wants, like a cat, if Fenris gives in now. He lists to himself the reasons that it would be a poor idea to open his door now.

But he does it anyway, though he has to use all his weight to get it open, with all the snow packed up around it. He looks to the right when he does, and sure enough the boy is sitting there. Snow clings to his hair and lashes, has melted through his clothes, onto skin that has lost all its colour. He shivers violently,and snot drips from his nose. He looks up at Fenris, then down again. He expects nothing.

Fenris doesn’t know what to say, so instead he opens the door wider, makes what he thinks is a gesture to invite the boy in. When the boy moves it is painful to watch him – the chill has settled into his bones, making him slow and stiff. Fenris doesn’t help – just stands and waits. It takes nearly half an hour for him to make it all the way up the stair and to the fire. Once his lips are less blue he speaks, voice raspy. “Thank you.”

Fenris doesn’t respond.

It becomes a new pattern. Fenris lets him in almost every night, but only lets him sleep in the front room of the mansion. Over a period of time he slowly learns things about the boy. He’s eleven years old, an orphan and he wants to know utterly everything about the world. Progress is slow, with Fenris’ refusal to ask any questions himself. He doesn’t care enough to ask, but he will listen. He doesn’t have answers for most of the boy’s questions, though. Why do people have ten fingers? What are toes for? Why do leaves go brown when they die?

When Hawke notices the boy’s presence she raises an eyebrow, but Fenris just gives her a look that he hopes tells her to mind her own business. She does, to an extent, but the next day at The Hanged Man, everyone has to ask him about his new ‘tenant’. He ignores them.

Fenris has never been careful to remember when to pick up more supplies, and one day finds himself without anything to light the fireplace. “Sorry,” he mutters to the boy. It’s better than being outside at least. He looks down at his book, tries to distract himself from the cold. It would work better if he did not have to spend a minute trying to understand each work.

Suddenly, he hears a crackling noise, and feels a soft warmth spreading in front of him. He looks up. The fire is burning. He looks to the boy – a glow is fading from his hands. He looks half hopeful, and half guilty.

Fenris’ mouth opens, and then shuts.

Everything tumbles from the boy’s mouth at once. Please, please, he was trying to help that’s all, he’d never hurt anyone, don’t tell them where he is, please, please. There are tears welling in his eyes. Fenris remembers the bruises.

“Get out,” he tells him, tone suddenly vicious. The boy scrambles to his feet, nearly stumbles over his own legs in his hurry to get out. He doesn’t leave him food again, but he doesn’t tell anyone about him. Even that feels wrong, makes Fenris’ stomach twist in an unpleasant way

The last time he sees the boy is on a day in spring. He hears a wild, urgent thumping on his door. “Please, please!” He recognises the voice. He quietly walks closer, to the other side of the door, but doesn’t open it. “Please open the door!” Fenris knows, without looking, what is happening. Slowly, his hand moves towards the door – then drops limply by his side.

He cracks the door open when the cries have faded, sees the boy being escorted away by two Templars.

He tries not to think of him again.


End file.
